This invention relates to the spray-coating of protective armoring shields, or coatings, onto selected exposed surfaces of client wheeled vehicles, such as a client military tanker vehicle, and a client military personnel-carrier vehicle. The invention features a highly mobile, compact, self-contained, ground-traveling system for field-implementing such spray-coating activities. This mobile system is referred to herein as a mobile transform structure having two distinctly different structural modes, one of which is referred to as a tractor-trailer structural mode, with respect to which the transform structure is reversibly transformable, is referred to herein as a spray-booth structural mode. For illustration purposes only, the invention is described and pictured herein in a military setting, wherein it has been found to offer special utility.
Recent progress in the science and art of applying ballistic, up-armoring shield coatings (called armor coatings) to surface areas of military wheeled vehicles has led to various spray-on approaches which apply composite blends of fast-curing armoring/jacketing materials. The present invention, recognizing both the technical importance of these approaches, and the expressed need to make them readily available to myriad, in-the-field military vehicles which are deployed in widely scattered locations, responds to this recognition with a ground-traveling, fully self-contained, vehicular-carried, armoring spray-application system which can be taken to the respective sites of different subject vehicles (client vehicles) having surfaces to be armor-coated.
References made herein to wheeled vehicles is intended to include reference to various kinds of self-propelled, ground-traveling vehicles, including appropriate kinds and styles of track-laying vehicles. The terms “wheeling-in” and “wheeling-put” refer to traveling motions created in such vehicles.
Proposed, according to a preferred embodiment and manner of practicing this invention, is a tractor-pulled, elongate trailer structure including an elongate trailer body formed with lateral side panel assemblies that are hinged for book-cover-like swinging toward and away from one another, generally about axes which parallel the long axis of the trailer body, in order to enable opening and closing of the trailer body during implementation of the invention. The trailer body, in what is referred to herein as a closed condition, is transported to the site of a subject (client) wheeled vehicle having a surface which is to be armor spray-coated. At the site of this subject vehicle, the tractor is uncoupled from the trailer structure and the included trailer body, and the lateral side panel assemblies in the trailer body are swung outwardly and away from one another to open up the trailer body. This opening up activity forms a deck with respect to which an invention-included, and previously stowed, canopy structure, including suitable support hoops and typically a fabric canopy covering material are assembled to define, along with the open trailer body, an open-ended, elongate spray-coating enclosure adapted to receive a “wheeled-in” subject (client) vehicle.
Preferably, by the time the canopy structure is erected with respect to the opened trailer body, the trailer body is in a condition lowered to, and stably supported in a fixed condition, on the underlying ground, with a ramp then deployed adjacent one end of the trailer body which enables wheeling-in and wheeling-out of a subject wheeled vehicle to be armor coated with respect to one or more of its selected, exposed surfaces. Preferably, further, the very same tractor which is used to transport the trailer body to the site of a subject wheeled vehicle, once uncoupled from the trailer structure at the site of such a vehicle, may then be used, if desired, for the actions of wheeling-in and wheeling-out of a subject vehicle relative to the spray-coating enclosure.
Disposed in the overall trailer structure, in a tag-along trailer unit which is coupled to the trailer body adjacent the opposite end of the trailer body from that end which is made accessible for the entrance and exit of a vehicle to be surface coated, is a self-contained spray-coating system. This system includes all necessary coating supplies, conduit structures, valving structures, portable hose-connected spray heads, etc., that make up the self-contained spray-coating system.
The system and methodology proposed by this invention have the distinct advantage of being transportable readily to a variety of locations where vehicles having surfaces which are desired to be armor-coated are located, with all relevant spray-coating apparatus, including an enclosure wherein coating can take place, completely self-contained within a towable trailer structure per se.
The various features and advantages of the invention, some of which have just been suggested, will now become more fully apparent as the descriptions of the system and the methodology of this invention which follow are read in relation to the accompanying drawings.